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"That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire. Born of a green and pleasant land, a temperate land, the English have a basic inability to conceive of disaster, even when it is man-made."
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"It never occurred to me that we would have as grandiose a program as the Marshall Plan, but I felt that we had to do something to save Europe from economic disaster which would encourage the Communist takeover."
"Turning the Internet over to the U.N. or some other phony international organization would be a disaster, and I am not willing to stand by and let it happen."
"Unlike most major American cities, Honolulu is geographically insulated from the rest of the country. When disaster strikes we cannot call on neighboring states for assistance."
"It is always one's virtues and not one's vices that precipitate one into disaster."
"One morning, just like 9/11, there's going to be a disaster. I have yet to see the United Nations do anything effective with either Iran or North Korea."
"Trusting our intuition often saves us from disaster."
"What's sort of interesting about the whole public relations disaster that is the Net, in some ways, is that the fundamentals are really good."
"Sometimes it takes a natural disaster to reveal a social disaster."
"Mr. Chairman, obviously a $60 million cut in the National Endowment for the Arts would be a disaster."
Explore more quotes by Zadie Smith
"When I write I am trying to express my way of being in the world. This is primarily a process of elimination: once you have removed all the dead language, the second-hand dogma, the truths that are not your own but other people's, the mottos, the slogans, the out-and-out lies of your nation, the myths of your historical moment - once you have removed all that warps experience into a shape you do not recognise and do not believe in - what you are left with is something approximating the truth of your own conception."
"They caught up with each other's news casually, leaving long, cosy gaps of silence in which to go to work on their muffins and coffees. Jerome - after two months of having to be witty and brilliant in a strange town among strangers - appreciated the gift of it. People talk about the happy quiet that can exist between two lovers, but this too was great; sitting between his sister and his brother, saying nothing, eating. ~ on the comforts of home."
"It starts innocently. Casually. You turn up at the annual spring fair full of beans, help with the raffle tickets (because the pretty red-haired music teacher asks you to) and win a bottle of whiskey (all school raffles are fixed), and, before you know where you are, you're turning up at the weekly school council meetings, organizing concerts, discussing plans for a new music department, donating funds for the rejuvenation of the water fountains-you're implicated in the school, you're involved in it. Sooner or later you stop dropping your children at the school gates. You start following them in."
"The wind picked up, shaking the trees below. She had the sense of being in the country. In the country, if a woman could not face her children, or her friends, or her family " if she were covered in shame " she would probably only need to lay herself down in a field and take her leave by merging, first with the grass underneath her, then with the mulch under that. A city child, Natalie Blake had always been naive about country matters. Still, when it came to the city, she was not mistaken. Here nothing less than a break " a sudden and total rupture " would do."
"Mothers are urgently trying to tell something to their daughters, and this urgency is precisely what repels their daughters, forcing them to turn away. Mothers are left stranded, madly holding a lump of London clay, some grass, some white tubers, a dandelion, a fat worm passing the world through itself."
"Girls either wanted him or wanted to improve him, but most often a combination of the two. They wanted to improve him until he justified the amount they wanted him."
"My feeling is, having lived in different classes, that people want equality of opportunity... that's the thing that makes me despair: the idea that people aren't given equality of opportunity."
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